A weak beam of sunlight pierced the roiling, apocalyptic clouds. That was all that remained of the natural state of the weather.

The mad hurricane of Ariock was a thousand miles away, but he was getting madder. Wind shrieked past floating tower tops. The scudding clouds were so thick, day was as dark as night. Earthquakes rippled the wrecked remains of the lower city.

Yeresunsa powers were tied to emotions. Quitting was literally impossible for Ariock right now, due to the insanity gas, yet he must be holding onto a shred of sanity. He was wasn’t roving all over the planet.

Yet.

Evenjos paced.

She ignored the thousands of people who watched her beneath emergency lights, some of whom chanted prayers to the Lady of Sorrow. In an era where a galactic empire wielded unprecedented power, how could anyone worship a lone Yeresunsa? She supposed they prayed because they were drowning and grasping for reeds.

“Lady?” That was Nethroko.

She thought he spoke with respect, but it was difficult to tell, since the nussian was beyond her range of telepathy. His voice was so deep and gravelly.

“Garrett said insanity gas is a death sentence,” Nethroko said. “He wants you to heal the Son of Storms.”

Evenjos paced the other way, wings shielding her back. Did Nethroko and his cohorts want her to approach Ariock right now? She would fail and die. She would use up all of her vast power in a futile attempt to wrestle Ariock in all his strength.

If only she had studied neurochemistry more assiduously.

Evenjos could imitate anything on a superficial level, but she could not magically regenerate part of her body into becoming a functional tranquilizer, let alone an antidote to the mysterious insanity gas. She would not know where to begin. Thomas might be able guide her, if she could reach him on a supercom. Then again, it would probably take years for her to understand anything beyond the basic principles.

“Is it possible you can stop him?” Nethroko asked. “These might help.”

The big nussian offered three gigantic hypodermic darts. The darts appeared cruel enough to punch through armor, if shot at high velocity.

“Torth use these to stop berserk nussian gladiators,” Nethroko explained. “It might work on the Son of Storms. We filled these with a mixture of inhibitor serum plus tranquilizer.”

Another nussian leaned in. “Jonathan Stead tried to inject him, but he missed.”

“He could not get close enough,” Nethroko corrected. His small eyes fixed on Evenjos with unspoken significance. Plainly, he wanted Evenjos to do what Garrett could not accomplish.

Evenjos walked over and plucked one hypodermic out of Nethroko’s grasp. Its contents could kill her. One brush of that liquid would make her lose cohesion forever.

She studied its sharp tip.

The Torth pilots were likely guided by an enemy super-genius or two. She would be risking her life just to get close to his core body. They might saturate the area with deadly inhibitor gas. Even if she survived that gauntlet…

Would the enraged Ariock allow her to get close enough to his mortal body to poke him with a needle?

She remembered her own furious shock and pain after Elome had stabbed her in the back. That sense of betrayal. Her own unthinking rage, once she was resurrected.

She would have to reassure Ariock in some way. She could not allow him to see a needle.

Could she trick him? Make him trust her, if only for a short time?

Then, if she succeeded, she would need to immediately haul his unconscious body to a safe place while Torth shot missiles and inhibitor at her.

What if she missed?

Evenjos rolled the deadly needle between her fingers. Ariock had excellent battle instincts. She would only get one attempt to surprise the enraged titan.

The indoor pavilion trembled from a violent burst of thunder. Glass shattered. Urns and decorative elements fell.

Evenjos had already manipulated Ariock, pretending to be his human lover. How could she even consider doing that again? She would be making a mockery of his tenuous trust. She did not want to become his Elome.

And yet.

Evenjos surveyed the desperate people all around her. No one else had a chance of pulling off a rescue. The cloud fleet was decimated. Individual pilots had no chance to get close to the furious stormbringer, let alone airlift him to a safe haven.

She considered the love Garrett had shown her.

Garrett must be in grave trouble right now, but Evenjos could not teleport, so she could not aid him. All she could do was honor the trust he had shown her. Garrett cared about Ariock, probably more than he cared about anyone else in the universe. If Garrett survived only to learn that his great-grandson was dead, or captured by Torth…? Garrett would never forgive himself.

The old man would take any number of stupid risks to rescue Ariock. He had already done so.

Evenjos was his last hope.

She transformed one of her legs, making it hollow. It became the simulation of a prosthetic.

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“I will do what I can,” she said, placing the hypodermic dart into her simulated prosthetic leg. “I will only get one shot.” She refused to carry the other tranquilizer needles. If Ariock smashed her, the broken contents of a needle would unmake her forever.

Nethroko and others watched her with hope in their beady eyes.

Evenjos could not afford to think too hard about what she meant to do. Otherwise she would talk herself out of it.

Quivering with fear, she launched herself skyward.

Evenjos arrowed through clouds so thick, they were nearly solid. Magma oozed in runnels along the distant ground, like veins flayed open. Buildings crumpled between sharp new crags of rock. The wreckage of crashed transports burned here and there. Ariock had become destruction incarnate.

There were ancient tales about this.

Stories about destructive incarnations were long-forgotten in this era, but the Yeresunsa Academy had been full of cautionary tales. A powerful Yeresunsa who lost touch with their own sense of self—who lost track of their core, becoming wholly enveloped by some runaway emotion—could become a gross embodiment of a specific power, or a set of powers. Fire. Flooding. Quakes. Tornadoes.

Stormbringers, with more than one extracorporeal power, were particularly susceptible to losing control. That was why many of them led celibate lives.

They used to, anyway. Back then.

Evenjos reminded herself that Ariock’s rage was not his fault. He was a victim, and she might just as easily fall victim to that insanity gas. She had to be extra careful.

She stopped breathing. She erased her own nose and mouth and ears, sealing all orifices, subsuming cloth and hair and anything soft into her body. Her skin became as metallic and inhumanly opalescent as her wings. She was impenetrable.

She was a bullet. This was how she would get through his shrieking winds of insanity.

As she zipped through the pulverizing hurricane, traversing miles within seconds, she knew that no transport or ordinary person could withstand the forces here. Ariock had surrounded his core self with blade-like crosswinds that destroyed anything larger than a pebble.

Evenjos encapsulated the hypodermic needle inside her hardened self. She held her impenetrable body together with the power of her mind as she whipped past ashes and pebbles of debris, determined to get to the other side.

A colossus emerged in the core of hurricane.

He was the size of a volcano. He was rock and sand and liquified torment, and he was moving. One of his enormous, hollowed black-hole eyes focused on the tiny bullet that was Evenjos.

Oh no.

Evenjos summoned all of her shapeshifting expertise. She kept her skin hard and impenetrable, yet she also morphed into the soft, feminine form of Violet Hollander. Only one leg remained visibly chrome-hard. Her false prosthetic contained the dart. She needed to protect that dart from destruction or she was dead.

“Ariock?” At least she did not need to fake being scared as she fell and bounced in vicious crosswinds. “I love you. Please don’t hurt me?”

This was so unnerving. Was her voice the right timbre and pitch? Was her hair the right shade of coppery red? Had she forgotten any crucial details about the way Vy looked and acted?

Winds died down.

Magma hardened to rock.

Oceans realigned themselves.

A much more human-sized titan emerged from the eye of the storm, floating on a wave of pressured air and crackling lightning.

His galaxy armor was hardly even scratched. His hair was a mess, unprotected by any helm, and his bloodshot eyes were narrowed with suspicion. Raw power radiated him off him like the strength of a supernova.

He was not even remotely depleted. If anything, he must be fighting to contain his rage and power.

Yet he had dared to expose his mortal body.

Evenjos acted as fast as she could. She spread her arms like she wanted to hug the giant even as she fell towards hellish fissures in the wasteland below. A ribbon separated from her back—an undulating appendage with snake-like strength. She liquified her prosthetic long enough to seize the hypodermic.

And she plunged it towards Ariock’s thick neck.

He roared and twisted away.

A cliff-sized sledgehammer rocketed towards Evenjos. She let go of her bodily cohesion and his titanic strength tore through her without effect.

Ariock shielded himself with rocks, cascades of sand, and a cage of electric energy. Evenjos tunneled through his shields with a million tiny drills. Boulders plummeted through the air she occupied. She formed makeshift blades and used them to rip through his solid defenses.

He chopped at her with sand-infused wind.

She stabbed the naked skin on the nape of his neck. She hardened her appendage against his furious forces, holding the needle in place.

Ariock shoved her harder and harder. His strength was inexorable. Unstoppable. She was not going to be able to…

But the dart was emptied.

Evenjos let the crosswinds disintegrate the needle and her own body. She surrendered, mere ash and dust ravaged by terrible forces.

Ariock threw her with so much force, it was all she could do to hold onto consciousness. She fought. She fought to remain conscious, because that was her life. He was scouring her…

Until his hurricane winds began to ebb.

The whole world changed.

Boulders dropped out of the sky and splashed into magma that was already hardening to black rock. Tectonic plates shifted, no longer gripped by an outside presence. Ash fell like sleet.

Ariock fell, too.

Evenjos coalesced into her default form, the winged goddess-empress she had practiced for more than a century in her original era. She caught Ariock in her strengthened arms. She had to stretch herself just to hold onto him.

He was breathing. Good.

Blood leaked from the corners of his eyes, and the veins of his forehead and neck looked swollen and dark. He was fighting even while unconscious.

Fighting to live.

Corpses and wreckage littered the wasteland below. The two of them were the only living beings for hundreds of miles.

A nuclear detonation ripped the atmosphere apart.

The shock wave would have vaporized Evenjos and Ariock, if not for the airtight shield she threw around them at the last second. Corpses burned to cinders. The ground became a scorching hot zone of death.

The second bomb turned the night-dark sky into blazing, blinding light. It would deafen anyone with eardrums. No doubt it was damaging Ariock.

Shuttles swarmed out of the ballooning mushroom clouds, and Evenjos knew that she would be insane to stand her ground. The Torth armada seemed to consist of relatively ordinary pilots—with Ariock’s raw power nullified, she was able to sense life sparks when she expanded her awareness—but they had the insanity gas. And inhibitor gas. And who knew what other weapons.

They were shooting missiles, and they were likely being choreographed by a super-genius.

Evenjos hauled the behemoth that was Ariock high into the air. Thousands of missiles targeted them, speeding as fast as bullets. She had to dodge and twist, faster than any game she’d ever played, with Ariock as a dead weight that she was unaccustomed to.

CloudShadow MetroHub was a bad idea. Evenjos would not lead the Torth armada towards any populated areas.

A cave, then? Or a glacial crag in the distant mountains?

She must find some obscure shelter. She must do everything she could to hide from the monsters of this era.

Evenjos plunged through storm clouds that still looked violent, webbed with continuous bolts of lightning. Deadly radiation blew across what used to be a pleasant desert. Without his powers, Ariock was as vulnerable as any human. His ability to heal and recover would be impeded.

Would he even be sane when—or if—he woke up?

The Yeresunsa of her time used to pray to their illustrious ancestors as if they were deities. Evenjos might have considered praying to her grandmother … but when she’d been trapped in the mirrors, on the twilight edge of life for an eternity, she had sensed the endless barrier between life and death. No one crossed over until their last breath left them, and their heart stopped beating.

The dead never returned.

Evenjos flipped above a spinning projectile that emitted pink gas. She held her breath as she tunneled through deadly air. The Torth had guessed her weakness. They were shooting inhibitor.

She needed time. She needed peace. If she could stay hidden for a while, she would explore the misfirings in Ariock’s neurons and try to diagnose the problem. And cure it.